Paints and coatings are everywhere: on the walls of new apartments, on cars, furniture, ships, pipes and the packaging we open every day. Behind every can stands a long list of raw materials, and behind those raw materials a global supply chain. This note looks at where the market is today, where Türkiye stands in it, and what it means for manufacturers buying raw materials.
The Global Picture
Research houses put the global paints and coatings market at roughly US$200 to 230 billion a year, depending on how they count, with steady growth of around 4 to 5 percent a year expected into the next decade. Asia Pacific is by far the largest region, with close to half of global demand, driven by construction and manufacturing in China, India and Southeast Asia.
Architectural coatings, the paints used on buildings, make up nearly half of the market. The rest is industrial: automotive, wood and furniture, protective and marine coatings, coil, packaging and general industrial finishes. Waterborne systems now account for more than half of demand, as regulations on solvent emissions tighten and customers ask for lower odour and lower VOC products.
Türkiye: A Regional Producer and Exporter
Türkiye has built one of the strongest paint industries in its region. According to the Turkish paint industry association BOSAD, the domestic market reached about 926,000 tonnes in 2024, with an economic value of around US$2.47 billion. Türkiye ranks fifth in paint production in Europe, after Germany, Spain, France and Italy, and holds roughly 2 percent of the global market.
The sector is also export oriented. Exports of paint and paint raw materials passed US$1.5 billion in 2025, reaching markets across Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. Paintistanbul, held in İstanbul, has become one of the largest coatings fairs in the world, a sign of how central the city is to the industry.
What Goes Into a Coating
A coating is a careful balance of four families of raw materials. Each one has to be the right grade, arrive on time and come with the right documents.
- Pigments give colour and hiding power. Titanium dioxide is the white backbone of most paints; iron oxides, chrome oxide green, chrome yellow and molybdate orange give durable colour; carbon black gives deep blacks; phthalocyanine blues and greens and aluminium pastes add brilliance and special effects.
- Binders and resins hold the film together: hydrocarbon, phenolic, polyamide and rosin resins, and nitrocellulose for fast drying wood lacquers and printing inks.
- Additives fine tune performance in small doses: cellulose ether thickeners such as HEC and HPMC, coalescents such as Texanol™, anti skinning agents such as MEKO, matting agents and fumed silica.
- Solvents and water carry everything to the surface and evaporate as the film forms.
What This Means for Buyers
For a Turkish manufacturer, three things decide whether a formulation runs smoothly: consistent quality from batch to batch, reliable supply, and complete documentation. Technical and safety data sheets, customs codes (GTİP) and registration under KKDİK, Türkiye's counterpart to the EU REACH regulation, are now as important as the price.
This is where a local partner with stock matters. Since 1976, Gültaş Kimya has supplied coating producers in all 81 provinces of Türkiye from its warehouse in Çayırova, Kocaeli, working directly with leading producers from Germany, Japan, the USA, India, China, South Korea and Mexico. Many customers collect their goods from our warehouse the same or next working day, while full containers ship directly from the producer.